Lucky To Be Alive

Rungkarn / Lucky to be Alive Rungkarn Rujiwarangkul

1 (2,145

words) ID. 4680657

(short

story) [email protected]

Lucky to be Alive

By Rungkarn Rujiwarangkul

The voice came from somewhere, but he could not tell where.

He could not catch the whispering words.

They

sounded soothing, almost forgiving, and made him feel alive.

That was the only thing he could sense before a

sharp pain shot through his chest and a sudden burst of chaotic voices flooded into his head. "We’ve got him back! He’s on steady . . ."

Rungkarn / Lucky to be Alive

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". . . What a lucky guy . . ." # He woke up in a bed, damp with sweat.

The monitor’s

mechanical hum reassured him in the silence as if it wanted to comfort him.

The familiar soothing voice had once again

saved him, this time from his own dream where a pair of blood-shot eyes was penetrating and torturing him with fear, hatred, and agony.

His head throbbed like hell and

every inch of his body ached nastily that it made a simple task like lifting eyelids open become the most tiring job. The room blurred for a few minutes then started to clear. Gathering from what he skimmed through--clean odor, white room, monitors, rubber cords and wires in and out from his body--he figured he was in a hospital.

He fixed his eyes

on the white ceiling, trying to recall what happened but could not do much with all this nagging pain.

The door

knob turned, interrupted his thought, as someone slowly pushed the door open from outside.

A uniformed woman, whom

he assumed to be a nurse, stepped into the room. followed her movements. the monitor.

His eyes

She smiled to him as she checked

He wanted to ask her many questions but he

simply did not have enough energy to do so; needless to think about the bandage wrapping around his head.

She drew

the curtain open after finished fiddling with the cords.

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Then she left him alone in wonder and the dim of dusk, reflected through the glass window. # She wondered how long she had been lying there. Taking from the light coming into the house, it was probably five or six in the evening. getting up. get up.

She did not feel like

No, actually she did not feel like she could

But this stained, dusty, wooden floor was not

exactly the best place to be on for long either.

She

managed to push her torso up a little just to find out that her left fingers were out of place because they looked very purple and numbed.

She bit her lips as she cracked them

into place--her hand shook uncontrollably. right hand all over her face.

She ran her

Nothing smashed, just a

couple of bruises here and there, and blood stains from her nose and right temple.

She sat up on the floor, back to

the wall, and observed the room.

She thought it looked

like battle field in some bloody war movies except that this one was real.

The air stunk, three chairs broken,

dozens of bottles smashed, walls perforated, one woman deformed. Sitting there in the realistic war zone, she could do nothing but, once again, forgave him for what he did and helplessly sobbed to herself.

Rungkarn / Lucky to be Alive

4 #

"You are lucky to be alive, you know that?

You were

seriously injured and I doubt if anyone like your case would make it this far," a short, bald man with a ridiculous pair of glasses was talking to him. ". . . Your overall physical conditions are good except that you might encounter short-term memory loss and bad headache because your head was the worst part.

But

don’t worry you’ll soon resume your memory . . .," the doctor was babbling away while he tried to think about what happened. Apparently he had a very serious accident but he could not remember anything before it happened.

Yes, he was

drunk and just blacked out when he was driving the truck but that was all he could recall.

Once again, the pain

whipped through his head as if there was a large needle stuck into it, destroyed his building blocks of thoughts. He closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep, hoping that the soothing voice would comfort him again in his dream. # She did not remember going to sleep but was surprised to find herself on sofa instead of being on the floor. afternoon sunlight brightened up the room. battle field was cleaned up, crudely.

The

The mess in the

All the bottles were

Rungkarn / Lucky to be Alive gone.

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The air did not smell as bad as before because all

the blood smudges were removed though she could still see the dark patches on the floor. her face were gone too.

The bloody skin flakes on

She checked her fingers: they

looked slightly better. Anna . . . There were a bowl of biscuits and a glass of milk in a tray on the floor, presumably for her.

She slipped from

the sofa to sit on the floor, and slowly ate her biscuits. She wondered where her daughter was, then realized she might be at school.

Poor Anna had to put up with all the

mess her useless mother brought into her life, especially her mother’s boyfriend--the bastard.

Tears started to well

up in her eyes, wishing she could fulfill Anna’s life better. The front gate creaked: Anna was home.

She finished

her milk and wiped her tears as Anna walked into the room. Anna looked different; she dressed differently.

Her

eyes were hidden under a cap, and her smooth skin was covered under a long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans. "Hey mom, how are you feeling?" Anna hugged her mother. "I’m OK, honey," she could sense something, "but why are you wearing these clothes? Can you take your cap off?"

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And, in hesitation, Anna did. # He almost had enough with the pain. scream at them.

He wanted to shout at the bald doctor,

told him to stop gabbling. him die.

He wanted to

He wanted to tell them to let

But it was this soothing voice that kept him

alive. It had been a few days since he woke up, and the voice talked to him every time he slept.

He was curious about

the voice but he needed to quit thinking too hard: it gave him a terrible headache.

However in the past few days, he

could slowly recall few things before the accident.

He

remembered he was on his shift early in the morning, driving the truck full of canned salmons to Cliff Bay, still hung over from the night before.

Just while he was

gazing and being hypnotized by the sun rising on the horizon, a pair of blood-shot eyes appeared right in front of him, exactly like those ones in his dream. They were full of fear, hatred, and agony. They were haunting him. He stamped hard on the break but the damn truck would not stop.

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That was the moment before the truck accelerated through a sharp bent, in projectile motion, onto the rocky shore below. That was all he could remember. # She could not remember how long it had been since the last time she put her daughter into bed. the first time in years.

That was probably

Anna really needed a good rest.

As she walked downstairs, she tried to think of a name.

A company name.

Sea King?

Where, precisely, did he tell her?

No, something salmon…Sea Salmon?

King Salmon. She looked in the phone directory, dialed the number, and hung up a few minutes later with every bit of information she wanted to know. She put on her jacket, hid part of her bruised face under a dark beanie, and stepped out into the chill night. She could feel stream of anger pouring out of her against the cold air, against her forgiveness which was drained away completely after she saw what was hidden under Anna’s unusual outfit. Her anger turned into energy she needed to drag her throbbing body pass blocks and blocks of buildings.

Each and every screaming part of her body

reminded her of what he had done to Anna.

She limped along

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the empty streets, accompanied by the cold breeze of the late night. Two, or maybe two and a half hours later, she was standing in front of a white building.

Timing was not

something she ever cared but right now it was a perfect time.

There were only only a couple of nurses and a

security occupied the lobby.

That would make it easier for

her to enter without having anyone notice. the metal in her jacket.

She felt for

It cooled against her fingers,

promised to do her good. # The nurse had left the window slightly open for him. She said he needed some fresh air.

He could hear the

breeze leapt through the gap, making a strange, hollow sound.

The room cooled down a little.

There was no sound

to be heard from the outside, apart from the curtain which eased back and forth as it was teased by the gentle wind. He stared at the dim ceiling, thinking about himself and how lucky he was to be alive. was it, he wondered.

God’s?

And the voice.

Whose voice

After all, he could hardly

consider himself as the religious type, so why would God help him. He heard a footstep from the corridor. one.

He listened.

A very faint

The pace was slow, but steady.

It was

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probably the nurse coming back to shut the window for him. He closed his eyes, and decided to go to sleep. A moment later, she came into the room but she did not shut the window for him.

Still with his eyes closed,

wakeful, he could feel that she was standing right next to his bed, motionless, just looking at him. feel uneasy. He opened his eyes.

He started to

The figure was not the

nurse he was certain, though it was too dark to get a clear look of the face. The figure breathed heavily. "Look at yourself, you dirty rat," she taunted. is what you deserve.

"This

Just hang about in a bed like a

useless crip, so you can’t hurt other people." Her voice did sound familiar.

So familiar that it

triggered something in his head. All of his memory flashed into his head like out-oforder pieces and bits of scenes pasted together.

The

broken chairs and the smashed bottles, the smears of blood on the dusty, wooden floor, the woman beaten to death.

And

the blood-shot eyes of a girl, looking at him with fear, hatred, and agony. Anna. . . At that moment, the breeze swept into the room, seizing the curtain high up into the air, which momentarily

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offered the moonlight a chance to enter through the unhindered window, and reflected off a shiny, flat object in her hand. A knife blade. His eyes widened.

He screamed.

his throat was only a pathetic groan.

But what came out of He began to struggle

now. He was twisting around with all the strength he had left.

He remembered he had slapped her and beat her

viciously like she was an animal.

He had raped her,

completely ignored her pleading, right there in her own house, where her mother was lying unconsciously, beaten, unable to help her. "So you’re afraid now, are you?" She sneered. "You want to get out of here, right?

Beg me then.

Beg for

mercy you creature!" He tried to say something but he gagged.

Still

twitching, he was now unable to escape as the wires and the rubber cords entangled him. "Oh . . . you don’t care about begging anyway, do you? That’s probably what my little Anna did, but you couldn’t give a shit about it." She raised the blade high--"This is for my Anna." The second the blade was coming for him, he hoped this was only another bad dream, and the voice would come and

Rungkarn / Lucky to be Alive pulled him up from hell.

11

Then came the whispered words,

sounded as soothing, forgiving, and as clear as ever: Die . . . Her rage burst as the blade thrust into his chest with an enormous force.

His body jerked.

It was the moment he

realized that perhaps the voice belonged to God. Maybe it was God who demanded the sun to hypnotize him and demanded the brake to fail.

Maybe it was God who

wanted him to be back from death and wanted to save him, just for this moment. God wished him to redeem and get what he deserved. God wished him to die painfully. Again she jammed the blade into his stomach, and again, and again, and again, making little fountains of blood on his wilting body. Lucky to be alive?

For God’s sake, he was only saved

for this moment--the only moment for redemption.